Category: Observations

The NYT says: It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s about loneliness, competition, and deeply rooted barriers.

The impact of gender is hard to pin down decisively. But after years of biting their tongues, believing their ranks would swell if they simply worked hard, many senior women in business are concluding that the barriers are more deeply rooted and persistent than they wanted to believe.

Google launched Project Aristotle to discover the perfect mixture of skills, backgrounds, and traits that produce successful teams. After conducting 200-plus interviews, they pinpointed the following key characteristics:

In the commencement address he delivered at Harvard last month, Mark Zuckerberg warned the graduating students not to trust the story of innovation that Hollywood promotes — namely, “the idea of a single eureka moment” in which a lone thinker has a groundbreaking epiphany. He characterized this idea as “a dangerous lie” that discourages real creativity. But, The New York Times asks, what if it’s actually a real and benevolent force of innovation and progress?

While creative insight and analytical thinking are distinct modes of thought, they complement each other pretty nicely.

In our classrooms, we urge our students to express a range of opinions, to disagree, to become critical thinkers. Online is a different matter. On their Facebook and Instagram feeds, they are learning to conform and be uniformly agreeable, because opinion and difference can come with a high price.

“People have pressure now, more than ever, to project an image that everything’s peachy and wonderful in their life,” said one student.